Affirmative action is still needed

Reuters

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned by the NBA for life after racist remarks he made about minorities. He plans to fight the ban.

On Tuesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver did the right thing when he issued a lifetime ban to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racist remarks Sterling made toward blacks and other minorities.

But the U.S. Supreme Court recently did the wrong thing when it voted to uphold a ban on race-sensitive admission policies at universities in Michigan. The court's decision may ultimately kill affirmative action as we know it.

Justice Clarence Thomas was called an "Uncle Tom" by Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is also black, because of how the justice has voted on affirmative action, voter ID and the Affordable Care Act. Ironically, Thomas is an affirmative action success story. He grew up in poverty in Georgia and got into Yale Law School in 1971 as part of an affirmative action program with a goal of 10% minority enrollment. Today, he compares affirmative action to slavery.

Affirmative action is not slavery, and if the Sterling recordings showed us anything, it was that racism is still alive in this country and measures need to remain in place to ensure that minorities and women get equal opportunity at school, in the workplace and in society.

It's ironic to me that the push to kill affirmative action comes just weeks before the 60th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. While strides have been made educationally for minorities and women, too many of our college campuses still have a long way to go to achieve a better balance.

Race and gender should not be the main factor for college admittance, but they should be factors along with a student's high school performance, community service, ACT/SAT score and income. Doing away with affirmative action will not have a positive impact on college admissions, and that fails everyone.

Some lawmakers, such as state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend), believe that the Supreme Court decision should open the door for Wisconsin to go even further by doing away with all affirmative action policies in the state.

Grothman said people do not realize how expensive race and gender preferences are in our society, and he pointed to the targets for state and federal contracts for businesses owned by women and minorities or to businesses with certain hiring or subcontracting practices.

He called these kinds of requirements "divisive."

I say these requirements even the playing field because racism and classism still exist in this country. If it were not for such requirements, fewer minorities would have opportunities to succeed.

In an interview with MarketWatch, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said "People in high places have no will toward goodness unless the law is there to enforce it."

Of course, not everyone is bad, but there are people such as Sterling who will never view African-Americans as his equals.

Grothman said the best way to boost lagging levels of minority education, income and employment is to improve schools. This sounds good in theory, but it comes at a time when millions of dollars have been slashed from public education budgets, and when House Republicans have proposed steep cuts to the Pell Grant program and student loans, which further hurt the poor.

If fewer minorities and women are on campus, it will hurt not only the minorities who are there but also white students such as my white college roommate during my junior year at Marquette University, who had never been around blacks before.

He was a senior in the engineering program, and although he was from New York, his knowledge of African-Americans came mostly from what he saw on television shows — and it showed.

He was shocked that I grew up in a two-parent household and that I had never been incarcerated. That still didn't stop him from purchasing a mini safe to store his valuables.

Toward the end of that first semester, I even introduced him to some of my mother's soul food. We never became friends, but we both learned a lot from that experience.

Sandy Robinson, the retired director of the Educational Opportunity Program — a group that helps first- generation and low-income students at Marquette — told me that race still needs to be factored in because too many people of color and women still don't get the opportunity for a college education.

"A majority of the students of color on campus are from our program," said Robinson said. EOP has more than 1,700 graduates.

While EOP does not use race as a factor in admissions, due to income requirements, most of the students are black. Robinson said she started to see numbers changing before she retired in 2012.

EOP started accepting more Hispanic and white students because poverty doesn't have a color.

If education is the way for minorities to pull themselves out of poverty, then removing race from the equation of college admissions is a mistake. The law ensures that people do what is right.